Fresh from winning the 2015 Superbike World Championship title in race 1, Jonathan Rea took another fourth position aboard his Kawasaki ahead of Sykes, who seemed rider one who suffered the most in the hotter conditions.
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From the front row of the grid, the Kawasaki pair made solid starts but Rea skated wide at the first corner, conceding two places.
Rea had only needed a top nine finish to ensure he became his nation’s first motorcycling world champion since 1968.
With the summer break over normal WorldSBK service resumed with Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team) topping the times at Jerez in FP1 as the Pirelli Spanish round began thanks to his 1.41.957s lap time set midway through the 45 minute session. The over positive thing is that I’ve never taken a race win here and I did so convincingly in race one.
“Jonathan was very young when my father died but he told me that he would be a world champion some day and this will certainly be the icing on the cake for me”.
Rea and his Kawasaki team clinched the title with five races to spare.
David Salom (Team Pedercini Kawasaki) placed 12th at his home round, having got out of Superpole 1.
Jonathan Rea’s world title is a fitting tribute to both Joey Dunlop and his grandfather, Johnny Rea Snr, who kickstarted the dream and Rea also included his dad in his victory speech.
In race one it was Jonathon Rea’s team-mate, Tom Sykes, who took the race win from fellow countryman Chas Davis and Holland’s Mark Vd Mark.
“Right now it hasn’t sunk in”.
“It was a hard race and on every lap I was thinking about the championship and I was really happy in the end”. Moments like this are even more special because of the amount of challenges I’ve faced with injuries, a broken wrist, and more recently in 2013 with a bad fracture of my femur at the Nurburgring…
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The 2014 world champion, Sylvain Guintoli (Pata Honda WSB), rounded out the top ten, only 0.686 seconds from the best Friday time. We struggled in race two and perhaps chose the wrong front tyre. “I tried to recover but I just didn’t have the right feeling with the front brake and I had to settle for collecting some championship points”. First I’m happy. We worked hard all weekend. When we put the qualifying tyre into the Ninja ZX-10R for the second run it was very easy to manage.
